Angelika Calling Las Vegas an exemplary environmentally friendly city would be a huge stretch by all means of imagination. I'd even wager that Las Vegas is pretty high up on the top 10 polluters list in the United States. There's hardly any recycling efforts in the casinos yet, although at least the McCarren airport has introduced separate trash containers for recyclables recently.
That's why I got pretty excited when I noticed the small jewelry store "Blu Marble" at the Container Park in downtown Las Vegas. It sold all kinds of trinkets made of glass, including beautiful necklaces with glass pendants. Obviously, I had to strike quickly and purchase a few, which is when I noticed a flock of geese as a motif on one of them, reminding me of the popular "Grey Goose" vodka bottle. The sales person clued me in that all of the store's products are indeed made of old booze bottles, discarded by the casinos, which would be simply thrown away otherwise. The pendant on the necklace I had chosen indeed had been part of a "Grey Goose" vodka bottle! The Blu Marble jeweler is collecting about 15,000 bottles every year from the casinos on the strip and processes them to make jewelry from them. Top idea and top product for this edition!